Monday, March 17, 2008

A day as a housewife

Check out this article... One day as a perfect 1950's wife. A woman decides to act like a 1950's wife for a few hours, and obviously write about the torture and abuse in The Sunday Times. The comments are great too. I love the one by that Australian woman who implies that her entire life until her husband died was torture. Simply lovely, aren't these dearies.

After 14 years of matrimony it is beginning to dawn on me that I’m a bad wife. I’ve done the childbirth thing – very enthusiastically, four times – and I think I’m okay at mothering. I don’t shrink at getting up in the night to sort out a wet bed, I can knock out a Little Woolly Lamb fancy-dress outfit with five minutes’ notice and I can do a mean school project on whatever subject necessary.

I’m a passable adult, too: a lovely dinner party guest, a loyal friend, daughter, sister. But as far as doting wife goes, I think I lack form.

Indeed, only this morning I shouted a bit at Mr Millard before selfishly going for a run, only to return an hour later and shout at him again for not taking the dog out. I think I even called him an idiot.

Of course, I love Mr Millard but do I dote on him? Do I look after him? Do I nurture him when he is ill? I’m not at all sure that I do. Our set-up is based on equality, you see. We were married in the 1990s, not the 1890s. He’s a better cook than I am and has a much better bedside manner.

But does all this equality make him happy? When I murmur to him at 6am that he can probably find the paracetamol himself and could he, by the way, make me some tea, I am doubtless enhancing the female cause of parity in matrimony. But am I enhancing his life?

I was a little shell-shocked at this point. I mean, I must admit that I haven't grown up with a feminist mother and my parents are still together, yada yada et cetera, but seriously, I was a little disoriented at this point. I realized how lucky I am to have a girlfriend totally unlike this tired old hag. At the risk of sounding like a braggart, my girlfriend:

- Prepares dinner and dresses nice for me when I come home from work if she gets home before me. I simply love this. I suspect she is going overboard because it is a novel experience, but she has stated on many occasions that she loves to take care of me and is happiest when I burp and complain about having a full stomach after a lovingly home-cooked meal.

- Never shouts or nags at me. This is partly my doing, because I made it clear early on that I'm not the type of man that responds well to that.

- Does not demean me in any way, because she respects me. Imagine that, a woman respecting a man. Someone call the VAWA!

- Looks after me, nurtures me when I'm ill, cooks chicken soup (from the can, admittedly) when I have a cold, and all that jazz. Is genuinely worried when I'm sick, not just in a sense of "Oh deary me, what will happen if the farm mule kicks the bucket, how will I feed my children?"

You know, most of this stuff is common courtesy. I know that this hag has been married for 14 years and some of the magic must have worn off, but I think back to my own mother and she behaves pretty much the same as my girlfriend for my father. Heck, my girlfriend acts like a proper daughter when around my parents, including helping mom in the cooking and cleaning!

Equality means caring for your spouse when he or she is ill, not leaving them to rot. For crying out loud! Heck, my father cares as much as he can for my mother when she is ill, and its not because he calls himself a feminist, its because he loves her.

I have to say that any man who marries a Western woman is pretty much a fool beyond hope at this point. This is a 14 year old marriage, that's almost one generation ago. Imagine how the women who are getting married today are? But then, men have been conditioned over time to accept this as the truth and integrate it into their reality. They just don't know that women can care and love, and they think that foreign women are inferior because of their brown skin and their "subservient" attitude, no doubt thanks to conditioning by Western women who are petrified of losing their stranglehold in the face of cheap airfares and smiling, happy brown women who know the true meaning of equality, not the feminist definition of it.